Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  And so Lewis came back into her life.

  “ARE YOU USING an unsecured phone?” Lewis asked incredulously. “I can’t believe you’re... are you using your own phone? Jesus fucking Christ, hang up.”

  “I am not going to fucking hang up and I don’t give a flying fuck who can hear me,” Gwen said.

  “Have you been drinking? You’ll get us both arrested.” Lewis sounded on the verge of panic. Gwen could hear, at the other end of the connection, a background noise of traffic. Then Lewis hung up.

  “Oh, you twat,” Gwen muttered. She dialled Lewis’s number again, but this time all she got was an unavailable tone.

  She looked around the bar. This was not, she had sensed the moment she walked in, one of those bars popular with tourists or business people. It was dark and roughly-furnished. Most of the other patrons had the look of career drinkers. A lot of the older ones had tattoos and lots of bling, and attack dogs slumbering watchfully beside their tables. It was really not a place for a lone Englishwoman, and she suspected that if she hadn’t been so obviously and monumentally pissed-off one of the other drinkers would have tried to hit on her.

  Her phone buzzed. She looked at the screen and saw a text from an unfamiliar number. Buy a disposable phone and call me on this number, it read. I’ve had to ditch my sim you stupid bitch.

  “Oh, do fuck off,” Gwen muttered. But she finished her beer – her third in the past hour or so – and got up and wandered back into the street. There was a tobacconist’s kiosk a little further along, its windows piled with sun-bleached packets of condoms and bubble-packs of porno HDs. She bought a pack of disposable phones and stood in the street while she took one out and went through the interminable setup process. The phone was about as thick as an old-style credit card, printed on cheap resin stock, and the screen was almost unreadable.

  Finally, she got it up and running and dialled the number Lewis had texted her on. He answered almost immediately.

  “Do you want to get me arrested?” Lewis demanded. He sounded a little breathless, as if he’d been running. He’d probably just done what Gwen had done, gone down to the newsagents on the corner and bought a pack of phones. Lewis was out of condition.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got me involved in, but I’m finished,” Gwen said. “If I ever see you again I’ll fucking punch you.”

  “What? What’s happened?” The phone’s speakers were fragile and tinny; Lewis’s voice kept breaking up.

  “My contact’s been arrested and the police were at the hotel.”

  A long silence at the other end of the connection. So long that Gwen would have thought Lewis had hung up and thrown the phone away, if it weren’t for the sound of cars and buses in the background.

  Finally Lewis said, “What?”

  Gwen looked around to make sure nobody was paying her undue attention. “I went to the meet,” she said, “and as I got there the police were marching the contact away.”

  “How did you know it was him?” Lewis interrupted.

  “Lewis, I knew. All right? I knew. I went back to the hotel and the police were there too.”

  Another long silence. “Where are you now?”

  “Somewhere in Luxembourg City. I don’t know where. Lewis, all my stuff is at the hotel. I can’t go back there. I’ve got no clothes.”

  “Fuck your clothes,” Lewis said in a sullen, distracted voice. “Did you see where they took the contact?”

  “No, because I was going in the opposite direction,” Gwen said with exaggerated patience. “Lewis, will you listen? Something’s gone wrong. I’m on the run from the police.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “What? Okay, come on, Lewis, you tell me. You think about what I just told you and you tell me what’s really going on.” Gwen suddenly realised she was shouting. She glanced around, but she was still not attracting attention, which she thought was pretty good going, considering. She said quietly, “They’ll be watching the airport and all the border crossings. I’m stuck here, Lewis.”

  “Did you leave any ID at the hotel?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter. I booked the room in my own name.”

  “You did what?”

  “How the fuck else was I supposed to do it?”

  “You fucking amateur!” Lewis roared at the other end of the connection. Then the phone went dead. Gwen took it from her ear and looked gravely at it. Oddly enough, she found she felt rather better for having vented at Lewis. Of course, it hadn’t improved her situation at all, but still. If there were going to have to be Famous Last Words, fuck you would have to do.

  She snapped the phone in half, extracted its SIM, snapped that in half as well, and dumped both in a nearby bin. She looked around her. It was late afternoon, and the street was full of workers making their way home at the end of the day. Most of them were business-suited and carrying document cases. None of them paid her any attention at all. Gwen turned her collar up against a spit of cold rain, put her hands in her pockets, and started walking.

  SHE WALKED FOR hours. Night fell and the temperature plummeted. Around eleven she found an all-night café. The bar from which she’d called Lewis had served food, and she had tucked into a local dish of smoked ham and chips, but she was hungry again and her blood sugar was low and her feet hurt, so she sat down in the café, ordered coffee and something described on the menu as Judd mat Gaardebounen, and tried, for the hundredth time that day, to work out what to do.

  There was no way, she thought, that she was going to try to leave the country. The moment she tried to board a flight or cross the border she would have to offer up her passport, and that, she assumed, would be that. Ditto for booking into a hotel. She wondered whether there were any hostels which had a less-than-rigorous policy about registering foreigners. As just another face in the crowd, she thought she might be safe from surveillance cameras. Unless there were cameras at the pension, all the authorities had was her name, and facial recognition software only worked if you had an image to feed into it. Had there been a camera in the lobby? Had there been one in the taxi she’d taken into town? The concierge and the taxi driver would be working with the authorities to produce a likeness of her, but that was notoriously unreliable, just a guide, too vague for facial recognition.

  She’d used her phone earlier to withdraw a thousand euros – Luxembourg was almost the only European nation to use them, these days – at a Bureau de Change, so at least she wasn’t leaving an electronic trail when she paid for things, but that wasn’t going to go very far. There were some places where a thousand euros would have let her live like a queen for a week or so, but Luxembourg was not one of them. Would it be possible, she wondered, to hike across the border into France or Greater Germany or Wallonia? Luxembourg was a small country but surely it wasn’t possible to fence the whole thing off?

  Her food arrived. Pork again, this time served with beans and potatoes. She wolfed it down.

  While she was eating, someone came into the café and stood looking casually around. He was of medium height, and he was walking with a cane. Gwen watched with mounting horror as he smiled gently and began to walk over to her table.

  Thoughts of fleeing, of fighting her way out, passed through Gwen’s mind and were dismissed. There was nowhere to go. She sat, frozen, as the man with the cane limped up to the table, pulled out the other chair, and sat down opposite her.

  “Hello,” he said. “My name is Smith.” His English was excellent, and almost – but not quite – accentless. He had a young face, but his brown hair was touched with grey and his eyes looked tired. “You seem to be in some trouble. May I help?”

  Gwen sat where she was, speechless, fork in hand.

  The waitress came over. Smith said to her, “I’ll have what this lady is having – is it Judd mat Gaardebounen? Good. It looks excellent. And do you have any Polish beers? Tyskie, if you have it.”

  When the waitress had departed, Smith leaned his cane against the arm of his chair and
said to Gwen, “I’ve been following you all day.”

  Gwen said nothing.

  “I’m not the authorities,” Smith said. “I don’t even live here. I was due to meet somebody at the museum in the park earlier today.”

  Gwen stared at him.

  “I’m making the assumption that you, too, were due to meet with this person. He’d scheduled his meeting with me after yours, but I got there early to scope the place out and I saw him being arrested and I saw you making a run for it.” He smiled again. “Was that your hotel you went to? The one with the police cars outside?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “Then you need my help, I think,” said Smith. “I’m renting a flat on the other side of the city; you can stay there tonight and tomorrow morning you can tell me your tale of woe. And no, that is not a pickup line.”

  “Why should I trust you?” They were the first words Gwen had said since she’d ordered her food, and her voice sounded scratchy and very, very tired.

  Smith thought about it. “No reason at all,” he said finally. “And in your place I would be asking the same question.” He clasped his hands on the table in front of him. Gwen saw that his fingers and the backs of his hands were covered in scars from old burns and cuts. “I’ll be honest; I have a selfish motive. Your interests and mine have intersected, and that intrigues me. I’d like to find out more, and in return I’m willing to help you leave Luxembourg. I might even be able to get you back into England without causing any unpleasantness, although you might give some serious thought to never going back.”

  “I have to go back,” Gwen said. “I have a job.”

  “What do you do, if I may ask?”

  Gwen told him, and Smith looked sad.

  “Well,” he said, “if you worked on a building site I’d say there was a better than even chance of your job being waiting for you when you got back. But government?” He shook his head. “It’ll only take another day at most for word of this business to reach your Minister, and as far as he’s concerned you’re perfectly expendable.”

  “She.”

  “My apologies.”

  Gwen looked at her meal and suddenly felt sick.

  Smith’s food arrived and he tried a forkful. “This is terrific,” he said, half to himself.

  “Suppose I do go with you,” Gwen said. “What happens then?”

  “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You need to get a good night’s sleep, and then we need to talk. Now, finish your meal and let me eat this in peace. Then I have to have a quick word with the chef before we go.”

  SMITH’S FLAT WAS half an hour’s drive across the city. About halfway there they drove into a hailstorm fierce enough to make it sound as if an entire armoured division was machinegunning the taxi. Two minutes later they had driven out the other side, and it was as if they were in another city altogether. The officescrapers and historic buildings were gone, and instead they were in a district of shabby apartment blocks with brightly-lit convenience stores at pavement level, their windows lined with anti-riot mesh.

  Smith saw her looking out of the cab window and said, “Bad part of town. Took me ages to find it.”

  The taxi pulled in through an archway which led to a big dark space surrounded by flats. Some of the windows overlooking the space were illuminated, but not many. The taxi bumped along an uneven driveway at the bottom of one block, then abruptly came to a halt.

  “This is us,” Smith said calmly. He paid the driver – in cash; Gwen had begun to notice things like that – and led the way to a door and then up several flights of steps to a darkened landing, where he opened another door, stepped inside, switched on the light. Gwen stood where she was. There was still time to make a run for it.

  Smith, standing in the brightly-lit hallway unbuttoning his coat and unwinding his scarf, saw her standing there and said, “There’s a forecast of snow for tonight; you’re not dressed for it. You might make it to morning by moving from café to café, and you might even survive another night, but I wouldn’t bet on you seeing the weekend.”

  Ah, fuck it. Gwen stepped into the flat.

  2.

  IF THIS WAS a rich season for conspiracists, it was a decidedly thin one for Rudi. The Emergence had taken hold of the world and given it a good shake. His primary purpose, jumping citizens out of the Community, had blown away on the wind when the Presiding Authority selectively opened the borders and allowed anyone – within reason – who wanted to travel to Europe to do so. For a while, he had actually taken it personally. It was as if, unable to stop him doing what he did, the Community had finally decided to neutralise him by taking away the need to do it.

  Coureur business in general had taken a knock. Once, someone would find themselves having to retain Coureur Central in order to transport a package across Europe’s constantly and trickily reconfiguring borders. These days there was a postal service which passed through the Community, neatly bypassing all those irritating little countries. True, there were still certain things – and people – which the Presiding Authority would not allow on their territory, but the bulk of Central’s business had always been the movement of perfectly ordinary mail, and that had dried up almost completely. Again, if Rudi was of a paranoid frame of mind – and he found paranoia a perfectly rational worldview – he might think that this was a deliberate attempt on the Community’s part to stifle Coureur Central.

  The operation to infiltrate Dresden-Neustadt had really only been an attempt to satisfy a vague curiosity, to tie up some loose ends which nagged at him, to try to get a read on where Mundt might be and what his research might have entailed. There was no sense of any progress, and anyway, now it was over there was nothing much he could do but wait for Lev to come up with an analysis. In the meantime, all he could do was ask questions and poke and prod blindly, hoping something would happen, even if he didn’t know quite what.

  Lost for something to do, feeling weirdly adrift all of a sudden, he had stood down his networks and gone back to Kraków and the kitchen of Restauracja Max, where Max had been making do with a series of agency chefs, unable to quite work himself up to making a decision to appoint a full-time replacement. Late at night, after the restaurant closed, Rudi watched the news networks as the Community emerged blinking into the mellow sunlight of media attention. Like every other European, he scoured the magazines for articles about the Community’s negotiations with various nations and polities, read interviews with the first citizens to be allowed free access to their neighbours. Unlike every other European, he wasn’t reading to learn about the Community – a handful of years ago he had known more about it than almost anyone else in Europe – he was looking for subtext, trying to read the Community’s body language, gauge its intentions.

  He gave up in the end. His remaining contacts in the Community’s small and embattled dissident groups – which had more or less evaporated as soon as they were able to leave – were as clueless as anyone else. No one knew why the Presiding Authority had chosen to make itself known to Europe. Nobody knew what they wanted. Nobody knew what they were going to do next.

  Incredibly, even cooking, the safe space he had so often retreated to in the past, did not satisfy any more. He caught himself in the middle of preparing meals, wondering.

  “You’re bored,” Rupert said to him one evening.

  “Mid-life crisis,” Seth said.

  Seth was over from London, Rupert touching down from one of his long hungry tours of the Continent, so Rudi had taken them to Bunkier, over in Planty, where the food was basic but excellent and there was more beer than anyone could drink. Bunkier wasn’t, on the whole, a tourist place. It was a locals’ bar, really, for all its pretention, and he knew most of the faces in the crowd; students making use of the free wifi, people who had come to attend some evening presentation at the gallery, people meeting up with friends ahead of a performance at the theatre next door, people just out for a drink. And the three of them, sitting on Bunkier’s uncomfortable wooden chairs, the
remains of three suspiciously artisanal burgers on pieces of slate in the middle of the table and glasses of Okocim in front of them. Rudi looked around the café and wondered sourly what people saw when they looked at him and his friends. Not the truth, certainly, which was that two of them were former Coureurs and the third came from another universe.

  He said, “There’s something wrong. Do you not feel it?”

  Seth shrugged. Rupert took a drink of his beer.

  “It’s like that old cartoon, the one with the wolf and the bird.”

  Rupert, who couldn’t be expected to know what he was talking about, just sat there watching him. Seth looked mystified.

  “The wolf and the bird,” he said again. “The wolf’s always chasing the bird and the bird always gets away because the wolf comes up with these fantastically complicated plans that always go wrong and it blows itself up or falls off a cliff or –”

  “Road runner,” Seth said. “Coyote and road runner.”

  “Whatever. But there’s always a bit where the wolf – the coyote – chases the road runner and suddenly they run off a cliff. The road runner’s going so fast that its momentum carries it across, but the coyote keeps on running on thin air until it realises what it’s doing, and that’s when gravity takes over. It’s like that.”

  “What’s like that?” asked Rupert.

  “This.” Rudi made a gesture which was intended to encompass the entire world and all its madness but only succeeded in thumping a passing waitress on the hip. The waitress favoured him with the briefest of hard stares and a muttered kurwa under her breath, and was gone again between the tables. Rudi folded his hands in his lap and looked at his friends. “It’s like running upstairs and finding that someone’s forgotten to put the top step in.”